Backyard potter's tales
Backyard Potterer's journal: November
Illustrated and written by: Tiit Kändler, www.teadus.ee
Translation: Liis
Vole admiring poison pyramid
November 7
The Backyard Potterer goes outside and what does he see – the vole has shovelled up three little pink pyramids from its burrow. The same little pyramids that the Backyard Potterer so laboriously slipped into the vole’s tunnels the day before yesterday. It took some work to find all the tunnels, in order to slip the poison doses there. Well, what is there to say? Evidently the vole, besides being incredibly industrious, is clever too. The Backyard Potterer sighs and is almost reconciled to the seemingly inevitable fact that it will not be long before he has to fall underground, into the morass of tunnels dug by the vole.
Thereupon the Backyard Potterer uses the last moments left, gets out the lawn rake and starts to rake up the chestnut leaves. Interesting, he thinks, yellow chestnut leaves are so much easier to rake up than the green ones. He cannot determine whether this difference is due to the colour or the fact that the ones are on the ground, the others on the tree.
November 8
In the early morning the she-cat has carried this autumn’s first mouse carcass to the rug at the Backyard Potterer’s bed. But the first mouse doesn’t make an autumn yet.
November 9
A clock rings. Interesting, what time is it? Don’t know and will not ever know. There is no exact answer to the question, What time is it. Because then it will be something entirely else. Quite as it isn’t possible to answer accurately to the question where I am. Yes, where am I –where the head, or foot, or belly, or belly button is? Worse yet – it isn’t possible to give an answer to how much I weigh either. Because every moment my weight is different!
November 11
Czesƚav Miƚosz admits: „It seems that the Creator, whose ethical motivations humans have learnt to doubt, was primarily guided by a wish that things would be as interesting and amusing as possible.” In the yard there is plenty of fun at the moment. Namely, nothing happens there. Interesting – why not?
November 12
I read in a sales booklet that smart pots have been invented. A plant that grows in such a pot doesn’t have to be irrigated, fertilised or otherwise cared for, it is promised. All the care is taken cae of by sensors in the pot, a microprocessor and special software. It is not said whether looking at the plant too is cared for by some sensor. Interesting to imagine that within short – or long – there will be smart yards too. That do not have to be cared for in any way. Where everything is done by automatics, robotics and computer mathematics.
But don’t we already have such smart yards since ages? Named primeval forests.
And then a little longer still, and smart babies will be here. For whom there is no need to care at all.
November 16
The yard is in confusion. It is warm, just as if a local warming were going on. There are too many arguments about global warming anyway but locally the yard can be fairly precisely measured. Some lonely marigolds flower. The voles enjoy the unfrozen ground. The chestnut lets its last leaves fall in honour of the clear blue sky. How do the fallen leaves feel? ”Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over again.” Francis Scott Fitzgerald, American Jazz Age author knew it well.
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